


The (Witcher) Family Business

by freudensteins_monster



Category: Supernatural, The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Character Death, Found Family, Gen, Hunter!Eskel, Hunter!Geralt, Hunter!Lambert, Hunter!Vesemir, Implied/future Geralt x Jaskier, Monster Hunters, Monsters, No beta we go to super mega hell like castiel, Sort Of, euthanasia mention, i call mousesack ermion because i fucking hate the name mousesack, yennifer mentioned in passing because i can't write her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:14:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27523642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freudensteins_monster/pseuds/freudensteins_monster
Summary: Geralt had all but given up hunting after a job went sideways and left him wanted for murder in Blaviken. He was moonlighting as a bouncer across the border in Redania, trying to keep a low profile, when his brothers turned up to tell him that their father had "gone on a hunting trip and hadn't been home in a few days".
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Eskel & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Lambert, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	The (Witcher) Family Business

**Author's Note:**

> Because spn is everywhere again, and because I've been reading nothing but Witcher fics for the last *checks watch* six months, my brain just spat this out...

Geralt had all but given up hunting after a job went sideways and left him wanted for murder in Blaviken. He was moonlighting as a bouncer across the border in Redania, trying to keep a low profile, when his brothers turned up to tell him that their father had "gone on a hunting trip and hadn't been home in a few days".

None of them were related by blood. Vesemir had adopted them (though not in a legal sense of the word) after saving them from monsters.

Lambert's father had been possessed and had been beating the shit out of him and his mother for months before his mother died and Vesemir came along and exorcised the bastard. The host body didn’t survive but Lambert didn’t mourn his loss. Apparently his father hadn’t been the nicest guy before his possession.

Eskel's parent's had been killed by a werewolf. The ten year old barely survived the attack. He hadn’t been scratched or bitten, thank goodness, but had been thrown through a second storey window by a creature with the strength of ten men. Vesemir had set his arm and spent a good hour pulling shards of glass from the poor kid’s face, but there was nothing he could do to stop the wounds from scarring.

Vesemir's still not sure what had taken Geralt. Some sort cross between a succubus and a wendigo as best he could tell – he had never seen its like before he cut off its head, or been able to find any information about its kind since. It had been literally sucking the life from the child; his hair turned white, his skin lost its colour, and his green eyes faded to an eerie yellow. From what the eight year old could tell him when he regained consciousness, his mother had abandoned him at the campground - a place with missing posters plastered all over the notice boards - three days prior. Vesemir didn't bother looking for her.

But family is more than blood, so Geralt accepted the passport Eskel had magicked up for him (a Temerian citizen by the name of Eric du Haute-Bellegarde, because even though Eskel was his favourite brother he was still an asshole) and abandoned his half assed attempt at a normal life, riding his vintage motorcycle Roach behind Lambert's ridiculous van with the custom "Wolves of Kaer Mohren" art on the side.

It took them two months to track Vesemir down – with a little help from Yennifer, a psychic witch/bitch who Geralt had a volatile and athletic on-off relationship with – and when they found him, much to their surprise he wasn’t dead in a ditch but alive and well and claiming he’d retired. Some woman he’d saved (and had a brief fling with) back when they were both in their late twenties had passed away and left one of his aliases her horse ranch in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. He went to check it out, planning to selling it off to fund their little operation, but on the cross-country drive his own words came back to haunt him.

“Hunter’s don’t retire,” he’d told his pups, “They just get old and slow.”

And now here he was on the wrong side of sixty. His knees ached when it got cold, and the most recent injury to his shoulder hadn’t healed right so he couldn’t raise a shotgun without grumbling. He was definitely getting old and slow, and he didn’t like the idea of dying on the job any more than he liked thinking about his pups meeting the same end. So he took one look at the ranch and decided he wasn’t going to leave it for anything more pressing than grocery shopping, and when his pups appeared on his doorstep he was able to offer them a permanent home, or at least a home base until such time as they wanted to leave it all behind too.

They stayed for a few weeks, resting properly for what was possibly the first time in their lives, before Eskel’s custom search engine thing pointed them towards what was probably a nest of vampires two countries over. They said goodbye to Vesemir and hit the road together, content in the knowledge that they had a home waiting for them when the job was done.

Giving up “that whole lone wolf thing” and working with his brothers, for all they might annoy him, was definitely safer and better for Geralt’s mental health in the long run. But it did have a few drawbacks, mostly when it came to avoiding local law enforcement. Between Eskel’s scars, Geralt’s hair, and Lambert’s stupid van they were pretty conspicuous and were mentioned in plenty of police witness reports.

Lambert’s idea of a cover was to claim that they were a metal band on a Continent-wide tour, picking up gigs where they could. It helped that he had loaded up the back of the van with a band equipment that curious cops thankfully didn’t look too closely at. Not only were there guns and knives hidden all over the van, and the gas cans filled with holy water, but the bass drum was filled with homemade explosives, the cymbal’s were coated with silver and sharpened to a razor sharp edge (not that “Death Frisbees” had proven all that useful in the field), and one of the damn guitars doubled as a flame thrower. (“What? I saw it in a movie once.”)

Eskel had played along, even going so far as to set up an Instagram page for “The Wolves of Kaer Mohren” and had somehow turned photos and videos from one particularly drunk and rowdy karaoke night into a halfway decent music video. To add legitimacy to their lie he’d claimed.

Geralt thinks he did it solely to embarrass him, as he was the one is the video screaming the lyrics to his favourite Dethklok song.

Less than a month after Eskel posted the video they were at a bar in Posada grabbing a bite to eat, his brother’s trying to convince him to try drunk death metal karaoke again, when he saw some idiot musician, who was dressed far too brightly for a biker bar, and who had not ten minutes earlier had been booed off stage for attempting to woo the leather-clad crowd with acoustic pop songs played on a friggin lute, being led outside in a daze by a biker chick with a strange look in her eyes.

Trusting his instincts Geralt got to his feet and followed them without a word. A quick detour to his bike for his silver sword (he got shit for not using a machete like a normal hunter, but shut up Lambert, sword’s are cool) and the bruxa’s head was separated from her shoulders and Geralt had an unconscious bard in his arms.

“Fuck.”

When the kid - “Jaskier. And I’m twenty-five, thank you very much” - came to and was told what had happened he didn’t freak out like they were expecting but whooped excitedly and demanded more information about the world of monsters and demons that existed just beneath the surface of the world he knew. Geralt rolled his eyes and left on Roach. When his brother’s caught up with him in the next town he was annoyed but somehow not surprised to see Jaskier hop out of the van, talking Eskel’s ear off. There was no getting rid of him after that.

Jaskier had his uses, Geralt had to admit. He loved talking to people and somehow managed to wheedle information on whatever mysterious happenings they were investigating from people who would have slammed doors in Geralt’s face had he been the one to ask. He also took their fake band cover seriously, teaching Eskel how to play the non-flammable guitar, and coming up with original songs full of fantasy-horror themes and thinly veiled allusions to their hunts that he swore one day would make him famous. And on his first visit to the ranch he roped them all in to doing up Lambert’s van (“hashtag van life!”, whatever the hell that meant), making it a clean and functional home away from home, with plenty of upgraded secret compartments and a new “Wolves of Kaer Mohren” mural on the side at Lambert’s insistence.

And though he complained about being bossed around on his downtime, Geralt was grateful for Jaskier’s effort a few months later when Roach died in the line of duty and he had to join them inside the van. It wasn’t cramped and no longer smelt like a locker room full of wet dogs, and it had enough space to sleep all four of them in a pinch (two hammocks that hung from the ceiling and a small murphy bed in the back that he and Jaskier ended up sharing more often than not).

And just like that Jaskier slotted into their weird, dangerous lives like he was always meant to be there. He stuck with them through everything – monster entrails ruining his favourite shirt, the weeks where Geralt spoke solely in grunts, the days where Eskel didn’t speak at all, and Lambert’s annual “set everything on fire” phase. He survived meeting Yennifer and a friggin dragon in the same week, and the former’s predictably disastrous reunion with Geralt (which would be the last time they got together if Jaskier had any say in the matter). He even stuck around after Geralt became a father.

Geralt been younger than Jaskier is now, on one of his first solo hunts, and had taken a ferry to Skellige to investigate a series of strange murder-suicides; men who had killed their partners and then themselves, but some of them had solid alibi’s that placed them across town at the time of their partner’s deaths and conspiracy theories abound.

Posing as a private investigator Geralt got a hold of security camera footage from one of the victim’s neighbours. One look and Geralt knew what he was hunting; the silver sheen of the creature’s eyes marked it as a doppler, a shapeshifter. After a few days of digging he found a pattern and the latest face it had taken but he arrived too late. The doppler was standing over two bodies, still wearing the husband’s face. Geralt put his silver sword through the creature’s chest and made it three. The wife, Pavetta he later learned, was bleeding profusely but clinging to life and with her dying breath she begged Geralt to make sure her infant daughter made it safely to her grandmother.

Ten years later and Geralt still could not have told you what compelled him to take the baby girl from her crib instead of just leaving her and calling in a tip to the cops – the child would have surely found her way to her grandmother eventually. But he did take her, and a hastily packed bag full of clothes, diapers, formula bottles, and the stuff animal the girl had clung to in her sleep, and caught the ferry back to the mainland. From there he took a train into Cintra’s capital (he couldn’t very well strap the baby to his chest and take Roach), and strolled right up to the townhouse-slash-guarded fortress of the Lioness of Cintra.

Pavetta’s mother, Calanthe Riannon, was quite possibly the most powerful woman in Cintra, with a media empire that consisted of no fewer than four newspapers, seven associated newsites, and a television network. So when a strange beast of a man showed up on her doorstep with a wailing infant in his arms he was turned away. He persisted, handing the security guy a necklace he had taken from Pavetta, asking him to tell Calanthe that Pavetta had sent him. Ten minutes later Geralt found himself was loitering awkwardly in the foyer of the penthouse, tracking dirt onto the highly polished marble flooring, as he tried to rock the girl back to sleep.

“What have you done to Pavetta?” the infamous woman demanded the second she laid eyes on Geralt, the gold chain clutched in her fist.

“I couldn’t save her,” he replied bluntly, not knowing any other way to break the news. “She asked me to make sure her daughter made it safely to you.”

“What the hell happened?” she asked once her granddaughter was safe in her arms.

Geralt tried to imagine how the cops would explain it. “Her husband’s twin brother attacked them, or her husband attacked his twin, killed the other… She managed to fatally stab him a kitchen knife but died of her injuries.”

“That’s bullshit!” Calanthe hissed. “As much as I might have hated that snivelling little shit, Duny loved my daughter, and I put him through a CIA level background check before letting Pavetta run away with him – he doesn’t have a twin, so what the fuck happened to my daughter?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

Geralt sighed and prepared himself to be detained by her security team while she called the cops.

“It was a doppler. A shapeshifter. It had been seeking out happy families, replacing the husbands and playing house with the wives until the husbands got home, killing them both before finding a new target. I saw it wearing Duny’s face in some security footage, found out where he worked, got told he left early, went to their house to find them both on the ground and the doppler standing over them. I killed it, and carried out Pavetta’s dying wish,” he said, gesturing at the sleeping girl.

Calanthe had always been able to tell when someone was bullshitting her, and it was upsetting to say the least that the strange yellow-eyed man standing in front her of her was telling the truth.

Before she was able to come to terms with it and formulate a response the elevator opened and her husband Eist stepped out, followed by the captain of her local police precinct, both wearing grim expressions.

“Calanthe, it’s Pavetta. Something terrible’s happened…” Eist trailed off when he saw the man she was talking to and the child bundled up in his wife’s arms. “What… Is that Cirilla? How did she get here? Who the hell are you?” he demanded of Geralt.

The captain’s eyes widened in recognition and his twitchy little moustache twitched. “He’s a person of interest in Pavetta’s murder!” he blurted out.

“Thank you for breaking the news so gently,” Calanthe seethed, passing Cirilla to Eist. “This man is a private investigator I hired him to check in on Duny after Pavetta mentioned him acting strangely when we last spoke. I’m only sorry I didn’t send him sooner.”

“He was at the crime scene – he took the child from the crime scene! Skellige PD have been blasting amber alerts for the last five hours trying to find her! Do you know how many laws he’s broken?”

The moustache twitched some more as the police captain glared at Geralt. In response, Geralt pulled out his flawless fake ID and in a passable Rivian accent introduced himself.

“Gary Erikson, private investigator based out of Scala. And she scares me more than jail time,” he added, earning a small smirk from Calanthe.

“From what Mr Erikson tells me of the case, and now that you know the extent of his involvement, I trust that it will be promptly closed and Mr Erikson’s name kept out of all reports,” Calanthe decreed, all but daring the police captain to argue with her.

He cowed under her fierce gaze, nodding his head in submission before fleeing towards the elevator.

“Eist, would you get Cirilla settled in the nursery? I need a few moments with Mr Erikson.”

He hesitated, knowing there was a hell of a lot going on that he didn’t understand, but nonetheless complied with his wife’s request. She waited until his footsteps faded before addressing Geralt further.

“You’re not really a private investigator, are you? Erikson’s not even your name I’d wager…”

“No.”

“So what were you doing there if no one hired you?”

“It’s a family business, but no one ever pays us,” Geralt snorted. “A monster almost killed me as a child, the man who saved me and killed the creature raised me to do the same. We do it because someone has to.”

Calanthe’s eye’s widened ever so slightly. “There are more things like this, this doppler out there?”

“Plenty,” he conceded. “But you don’t want to hear about them. Not if you want to sleep again.”

“I doubt I’ll get a good night sleep again regardless,” she scoffed. “Wait here,” she instructed as a thought occurred to her. She came back a few moments later, Pavetta’s necklace still clutched in one hand and a thick roll of bills in the other.

“Thank you for being there for Pavetta at the end, and for bringing my granddaughter here,” she said, her voice wavering as the full weight of what had happened began to hit her. “In return I’d like a way to contact you should I ever come across something that needs your skill set, or if Cirilla ever has any questions about what happened to her parents.”

Geralt was reluctant to do so but the money was seriously tempting; credit card fraud and hustling Gwent games barely kept him in food and motel rooms. He caved, pulling a fake business card from his wallet and writing an email address on the back.

Four years later she used it to inform Geralt of a bunch of strange murders that had been happing up and down the coast that her papers had been reporting on that seemed similar to the doppler’s MO; husband kills wife and then himself. But in every case the autopsies concluded that the husbands had died hours before their wives.

Geralt replied and said he’d look into it but all it turned up was a human serial killer. Geralt wasn’t in the business of killing humans, even if they deserved it, so he knocked him out and called in a tip to the police, but not before snapping a few photos to send to Calanthe. He figured an exclusive story would ease her frustration, and earn him a decent tip.

Almost six years after that, while he and Jaskier were eating breakfast in a random roadside diner on the Aedirn/Kaedwen border (read: Geralt had finished eating fifteen minutes ago while Jaskier’s pancakes had gone cold as he spent too much time composing or talking in between bites), and Eskel and Lambert had already left to scope out a potential case, Geralt was using the diner’s wifi to check his various alias’ emails when he found another one from Calanthe.

“Come to townhouse IMMEDIATELY. Bring Erikson ID” was all it said.

The potential case ended up being a bust so Geralt was able to convince his brother’s to drive him to Cintra. Two days later he flashed his Erikson ID at the guarded door and was directed back up to the penthouse, where a harried looking lawyer escorted him to Calanthe’s room. He wasn’t sure what he expected when he received her email, but the Lioness of Cintra lying weak and dying in her bed while her ten year old granddaughter stared up at him with her mother’s eyes hadn’t even crossed his mind.

Eist had died in a car accident a few years earlier and there were only so many times even a woman as strong as Calanthe could fight off breast cancer.

“The girl has no one else,” Calanthe explained, and Geralt didn’t like where her train of thought was going.

“I can’t possibly be your only option,” he started to argue but Calanthe drifted off to sleep before he’d finished speaking.

He sighed, cursing the universe, as he stood awkwardly at the end of bed regarding the young girl warily.

“Cirilla, wasn’t it?” he asked, wishing he’d relented and let Jaskier tag along.

She nodded. “Just Ciri’s fine.”

“I’m Geralt. …did your grandmother tell you who I am?”

“She said you killed the monster that killed my parents,” she answered quietly, her own eyes never leaving her grandmother’s face.

“And you don’t think she was telling stories?”

She glared at him then and it was like meeting Calanthe all over again.

“Grandmother deals in the truth, in facts. She doesn’t believe in spinning pretty lies for children, even if it might spare them pain. If she said a monster killed my parents then I see no reason to believe she wasn’t being completely literal.”

“Fair enough,” Geralt mumbled, sufficiently cowed. “Did she… did she speak to you about what was going to happen… after…” Blast it all to hell, how he wished Jaskier was here.

“She was right; there’s no one else. A woman like her doesn’t have any close friends, only rivals and employees. And I don’t think she’d trust any of her charity circuit friends not to seek guardianship in order to get their hands on all the money and assets she’s put in a trust for me. Eist was the more sociable one, but his friends were more the fair weather, monthly gwent night types.”

“Why me?” he said more to himself.

“She said that if there was anyone out there she trusted to keep me safe in this world, it was you,” Ciri replied, her bright green eyes boring into his soul.

“Are you okay with her decision?” he asked. “What do you want?”

Ciri broke eye contact then, blinking away an errant tear, and returned to her bedside vigil. “I want the people I love to stop dying.”

The next time Calanthe awoke it was in time to properly introduce Geralt to her lawyer, Ermion.

“You’ll do it, won’t you? You’ll take care of my granddaughter?”

Geralt’s gaze flicked between Calanthe and Ciri, who was refusing to meet his eyes, and despite all the reasons not to he found himself saying yes.

Ermion sat him down at a table on the far side of the room with stack of paperwork for Geralt to sign to make “Gary Erikson” Ciri’s legal guardian. He also had to sign some papers waiving his rights to any of Ciri’s inherited fortune – outside a generous monthly stipend for her living expenses – even if she left it to him in a will filed after she turned 21.

“You’re really dotting all your i’s and crossing your t’s on this, huh?” Geralt snorted, but signed regardless.

“I’ve been Calanthe’s lawyer, friend, and confidante for the last twenty years. I love that child like she was my own blood. I’m just doing everything I can to protect her.”

“Why isn’t Cirilla staying with you then?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Because I’m old,” Ermion chuckled sadly. “I’ve got grandchildren thinking about college applications. Cirilla doesn’t need an old fuddy duddy lawyer like me, who’s probably going to keep working 60 hours a week until he gets carried out of his firm in a body bag. Not sure she needs someone like you either, whoever you are,” he added, eyeing Geralt’s usual all black, mostly leather ensemble dismissively.

“Calanthe didn’t tell you?”

“No, no matter how many times I begged her to explain herself. All she said was that she trusted you, and that woman’s trust is hard earned so I stopped asking. I don’t suppose you want to explain why she would choose you to take care of that which is most precious to her?”

Geralt made a show of thinking about it for a split second. “Probably better I don’t.”

“Figures,” he muttered as he put away all his copies of the signed paperwork into his briefcase, leaving Geralt to collect all of his.

A doctor entered the room and he and Ermion exchanged a look before the doctor moved to Calanthe’s bedside. Ermion sighed and got to his feet. “Better go sit by Ciri. It’s time.”

“Time for what?” Geralt asked.

“Time for Calanthe to die as she lived,” Ermion whispered as the doctor spoke with his patient, “on her own terms.”

Calanthe passed away in the early evening. Shortly after Geralt and his new daughter left the townhouse, with an open invitation from Ermion to stay there whenever they were in town. All of her belongings filled a backpack, a medium sized suitcase and two large moving boxes, and they sat beside them on the sidewalk while they waited for Geralt’s brother’s to bring the van around. Ciri spotted it first.

“What the heck is that?” she asked, her little face scrunched up as she took in the lurid artwork.

“That’s all Lambert’s doing,” Geralt chuckled as the van pulled up to the curb and the door opened to reveal a very confused wolf pack.

“Who’s that?” Lambert demanded, sticking his head out the passenger window to gawk at the child only to get smacked upside it by Eskel.

“Ciri, these are my brother’s Lambert and Eskel, and this is Jaskier, my… friend.”

“Were you going to say boyfriend?” Ciri, the perceptive little thing, asked earning a delighted giggle from Jaskier.

“I’m still wearing him down,” Jaskier teased. “We’ll get there eventually. And who might you be, my dear girl?”

“Everyone, this Ciri. …I just became her legal guardian.”

“No shit! We got a pup!” Lambert exclaimed excitedly, jumping out of the van to greet his niece.

“Cub,” Ciri corrected when he moved to hug her.

“Huh?”

“My grandmother was the Lioness of Cintra; I’m a lion cub. And I don’t really want to be hugged right now.”

“Fair enough,” Lambert replied, turning to squeeze the life out of Eskel instead. “Did you hear that bro? We got a lion cub!”

“Get off me, you prick!” Eskel groused, eventually prying himself free of Lambert’s arms. “Make yourself useful and grab her stuff. Sorry about that. It’s nice to meet you, Ciri.”

“Nice to meet you too,” she replied, shaking his proffered hand.

“Where to now, Geralt?” Eskel asked.

Geralt did his best to give Ciri a comforting smile. “What say we head home, introduce the cub to Vesemir?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“I’m driving!” Lambert shouted.

“No you’re bloody not!” Eskel cursed, pushing his way into the van to fight his brother.

“You’ll have to ignore them, Ciri dear. I would love to tell you they’re not always like this but that would be a big fat lie,” Jaskier grinned. He held out a hand and led her into the van to give her the grand tour. Geralt grabbed the last box and closed the door behind them just before Lambert, the victor, forced his way into traffic.

“And you’re going to love Vesemir – their father, in case it wasn’t clear – and his home. He’s got this lovely little ranch up in the mountains, and four beautiful horses, and half a dozen annoying little goats. He’d probably let you name the next horse he gets – just don’t let Geralt help, he names everything Roach. Don’t ask me why.”

“It’s a good name,” Geralt grumbled, as the three of them sat down at the small table. “Do you know how to play Gwent?” he asked Ciri before Jaskier could start talking again. Jaskier smiled at him and moved to grab his ever present lute to keep himself occupied while Geralt tried to connect with his daughter.

“Eist was teaching me. Said I was getting good.”

“Would you like to play a few rounds with me?” he asked, pulling his deck as well as Eskel’s from one of the van’s hidden storage compartments.

“Sure,” she smiled.

By the time they crossed the border into Sodden she had beaten him twice, and Geralt had never been happier.


End file.
